Town cracks down on abandoned buildings

Tarentum tears down seven crumbling homes a year

Like many southwestern Pennsylvania communities, Tarentum struggles with abandoned buildings that are unsafe and crumbling to the ground. But Tarentum is going after absentee property owners who allow buildings to fester.

One home on Fourth Avenue has an exterior wall that is bowing so severely that passersby worry it could collapse at any moment.

Stephany Irwin works across the street and said, “It's scary, it should not be here. The windows are all busted out, the doors are bolted on by wood. It's very unsafe. I would be nervous to even have my child, walking my child down the road.”

“People buy them and they can't afford them. They can't afford the payments, so, they walk away. Then the bank takes them over and the bank doesn’t want to take care of them. So, they just sit there," he said.

Sometimes Dzugan tries to broker a deal between the guilty property owner and a potential buyer for the property. Often the new buyer simply agrees to pay all the back taxes and offers the previous owner a dollar to buy the structure and raze it.

In addition, the Borough of Tarentum saves up to buy dilapidated and forgotten buildings and tear them down. It costs between $7,000 and $10,000. The borough can only afford to raze about seven buildings a year.

Dzugan said there are 92 abandoned buildings in Tarentum. About 30 of them need to be torn down “because the grass gets 5 foot high, then the roofs all start falling in. Then you get rats and drug people hanging out in the abandoned buildings.”

The challenge for Dzugan is when banks take over a property an owner defaulted on, because it is difficult to send a citation to a bank on the other side of the country.

Still, Dzugan is determined.

“I'll get you," he said, "If it was up to me, I'd chase you down in California and make you come back and take care of them.”

Irwin is eager to see the Fourth Avenue property come down.

“(In) Tarentum, we have a nice area and everybody works so hard around here. Seeing this, it kind of makes it look bad," she said.

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